Meanwhile Facebook is flooded with AI-generated slop with hundreds of thousands of other bots interacting with it to boost it to whoever is insane enough to still use that putrid hellhole of a mass-data-harvesting platform.
Dead internet theory is very much happening in real time, and I dread what's about to come since the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap. And people on this site are unironically excited about this garbage that is indistinguishable from spam getting more and more popular. What a fucking joke
The feed certainly is, but I suspect most activity left on Facebook is happening in group pages. Groups are the only thing I still log in for as some of them, particularly the local ones, have no other way of taking part. They are also commonly membership by request and actively moderated. If I had the time (and energy) I might put some effort into advocating to moving to something else, but it will be an uphill battle.
It is probably a mix of people who got nowhere else to interact with people, and people using Groups. Facebook was where you'd go to talk to all your friends and family, most of my friends have been getting shadowbanned since 2012 ~ so it made me use it less. I got auto striked on my account for making a meme joke about burning a house down due to a giant spider in a video. I appealed, and it got denied. I'm not using a platform that will inadvertently ban me by AI. But the people actually posting to kill others, and actually burn shit down, and bots stay just fine?
Plus I didn't want to risk my employers Facebook App being in limbo if I got banned, so I left Facebook alone, never to return.
Facebook trying to police the world is the only thing keeping me away, if I can use the platform and post meme comments again, maybe I might reconsider, but I doubt it. Reddit is in a similar boat. You can get banned, but all the creepy pedophile comments from decades and recently are still up no problem.
I stopped going on facebook a few years ago and don't miss it; I don't even need messenger as everyone migrated to whatsapp (yes I know, normal people don't want to move to signal, but got quite a few techy friends to migrate). The FB-only groups are indeed a problem, I'm delegating them to my wife.
IF I ever had to go to FB for anything, I'd probably install a wall-removing browser extension. Mobile app is of course out of question.
> IF I ever had to go to FB for anything, I'd probably install a wall-removing browser extension. Mobile app is of course out of question.
You’ll probably find you can no longer make an account. I’m in the same boat as you (not used and haven’t missed in over a decade), however, my partner needed an account to manage an ad campaign for a client and neither of us were able to make one. Both tried a load of different things and, ultimately, gave up. Had to tell the client what they needed over a video call
Must be something to do with our situation? Basically both I and my partner just got told we were making fraudulent accounts. Used our real names, emails, phone numbers and same result. Used multiple other phone numbers to see if they were blacklisted for some reason, nope. Used my mother’s WiFi in case it was something to do with IP, nope. Tried from India with an Indian phone, nope.
For me it's the Marketplace. Left FB many years ago only to come back to keep an eye out for used Lego for the kiddos. At least in my region, and for my purposes, Marketplace is miles better than any other competing sites/apps.
> If I had the time (and energy) I might put some effort into advocating to moving to something else, but it will be an uphill battle.
What are the alternatives for local groups? I've recently seen an increase in the amount of Discourse forums available, which is nice, but I don't think it'd be very appealing to the average cycling or hiking group.
There was no need to scroll through my history and analyze it. Your analysis is mistaken. I'm not a bot. Sometimes my comments are brief because I'm trying to be concise. I don't just express my agreement with a simple 'I agree', but respond in a more detailed manner yet also shortly.
And I don't understand why people lump all AI together as if a coding assistant is the same thing as AI generated spam and other garbage. I'm pretty sure no-one here is excited about that.
I'm excited about the former since AI has massively improved my productivity as a programmer to a point where I can't imagine going back. Everything is not black or white and people can be excited about one part of something and hate another at the same time.
Seeing some of the code my colleagues are shitting out with the help of coding "assistants", I would definitely categorize their contributions as spam, and has had nothing but an awful effect on my own time and energy, having to sift through the unfiltered crap. The problem being, of course, that the idiotic C-suite in their infinite wisdom decided to push "use AI assistants" as a KPI, so people are even encouraged to spam PRs with terrible code.
If this is what productivity looks like then I'm proud to be unproductive.
That's actually the preferred outcome. The open internet noise ratio will be so high that it turns into pure randomness. The traditional old venues (reputed blogs, small communities forums, pay for valued information, pay for your search, etc..) will resurface again. The Popular Web has been in a slow decline, time to kill it.
> The traditional old venues […] will resurface again.
… to be subsequently drowned out by AI “copies” of themselves, which in turn are used to train more AIs, until we don't have a Dead Internet¹ but a Habsburg Internet.
Is it really a decline? If people are looking for and consuming the slop, where is the issue?
There is still plenty high quality stuff too if that is what you’re looking for. If you want to roll with the pigs in the shit, who am I to tell you no?
I get your frustration of a scorched internet. But I don't think it's all that gloomy. Whether we like it or not, LLMs and some kind of a "down-to-earth AI" is here to stay, once the dust settles. Right now, it feels like everything is burning because we're in the thick of an evolving situation; and the Silicon Valley tech-bros are in a hurry to ride the wave and make a quick buck with their ChatGPT wrapper. (I can't speak of social networks, I don't have any accounts for 10+ years, except for HN.)
* * *
On "collective losing of minds", you might appreciate this quote from 1841 (!) by Charles MacKay. I quoted it in the past[1] here, but is worth re-posting:
"In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first [...]
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
— from MacKay's book, 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds'
I believe MacKay's book (quoted here) is most famous for its account of the Dutch tulip mania[0], which is one of the most notable financial bubbles in history (somebody reportedly paid 12 acres of land - 5 hectares - for a single bulb).
I think there's room for a middle-ground. I agree that there's a lot of slop being generated and shared around. Part of it is due to the initial excitement over these AI tools. Part of it is that most AI tools still kinda suck at the moment. In the long term I expect tools to get way better, which I'm hopefully could help enable smaller teams of people than ever before to execute on their creative vision.
Personally I have tons of creative ideas which I think would be interesting and engaging but for which I lack the resources to bring into this world, so I'm hoping that in the long term AI tools can help bridge this gap. I'm really hopeful for a world where people from all over the world can share their creative stories, rather than being mostly limited to a few rich people in Hollywood.
Unfortunately I do expect this to end up being the minority of content, especially as we continue being flooded by increasing amounts of trash. But maybe that's just opening up the opportunity for someone to develop new content curation tools. If anything, even before the rise of AI stuff there were mountains of content, and we saw with the rise of TikTok that a good recommendation algorithm still leaves room for new platforms.
They're trajectory is so close to AOL's it's almost implausible. Their cash cow flagship product is widely panned by tech insiders as abusive, manipulative, and toxic but they also place significant financial resources in high quality open source projects out of what can only be described as benevolence and some commitment to the common good.
In regards to the dead internet hypothesis, the content that you're enjoying today, will still be there tomorrow. What I mean is if you, for example, like Mr.Beast, AI is not going to replace him and the content that he produces. Now, he might use AI to boost the productivity of his company, but the end result is still "making the best video ever" as he's often said.
The big problem with this is that content is harder and harder to find. Try to find a non-AI generated reply to a viral post on Twitter, you're looking at having to scroll down 5-6 1080p screens to finally get to some actual stuff people wrote.
The content you're enjoying today still exists, but it's a needle in a haystack of AI spam
We need a law or something that impose platforms to label any text that is only AI and text reworked by AI. And the possibility to filter both (we did this with industrial products).
Then let humanity decide what it wants to feed itself with.
I prefer to give up completely internet if it would only be filled with generated content. I gladly let it to people who enjoy that.
Maybe a platform that label this and allows strict filtering (if possible) would be a success.
My take is to explicitly mark a difference between human generated content and AI generated content. Not to label one superior to the other. It’s just to let people choose what they prefer. Like in chat bots for some companies they let you know you don’t talk to a human.
Would you blindly accept a medical prescription generated by an AI ? Some people might even prefer the prescription made by the AI. All I’m saying is to inform people. After they make their choice.
This is the exact thing I keep telling people. It's all well and good saying human made content will still be around, but it will be covered in a tidal wave of cheaply generated AI hogwash.
The signal:noise ratio is decreasing because it’s easier to generate noise. I think paying for content (or content curation) is probably the way to curate high-signal information feeds.
Just like ads in your Netflix subscription, there is a large profit incentive to charge you for the "high-signal information feeds" and then... fill it with AI-generated content, which is much cheaper to offer.
I’m okay with AI being used in creative processes where the output is vetted by an actual human. If there’s AI generated content in Netflix ads, I’m guessing it’s of this type.
There’s also the option to move on from Netflix if you don’t like its content
Are we going to end up with rererecapture where to post you need something on your phone/laptop measuring typing speed and scanning your face with an IR cam? Or a checkmark showing typed out by hand? Wouldn't get rid of ai content but may slow down bots posting it.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but it's is not necessarily the case that "the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap". You only need a relatively small number of bad actors for this to be the case.
I am one of those people unironically excited - the social parts of the internet have been dead and filled with bots for a long time. Now people just see it more.
Bots were easy to detect, now they're almost indistinguishable from human interaction. The death of the internet would be an incredible loss for humanity. You will not be able to trust anything you find online. Nothing is safe from this.
I am using the broad definition of bots to include large numbers of accounts controlled by small groups of people to influence online discourse.
Between those bots (for nefarious, mundane, or marketing reasons) and previous attempts at automated bots, “broad” internet discourse was already ruined. Now people recognize it. This will have the effect of pushing communities back to smaller sizes, I think this is a good thing.
People shouldn’t have trusted all the things they read online from untrusted sources in the first place.
Every content that exists on the web could now be rewritten and repurposed by LLMs. This could lead into an explosion of web sites that could easily double in size every few years. Good luck indexing all that crap and deciding what is duplicate and what not.
Dead internet theory is very much happening in real time, and I dread what's about to come since the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap. And people on this site are unironically excited about this garbage that is indistinguishable from spam getting more and more popular. What a fucking joke